Developing Mesothelioma Treatment Options
Mesothelioma is not a form of cancer that lends itself to surgical resection. In addition, most diagnoses don’t occur until the disease is in its latter stages. For that reason medical researchers have focused their efforts on extending the period of patient survival after the diagnosis has been made.
These efforts generally focus on slowing or stopping the growth of the cancerous cells. There are a number of approaches to this concept. One chemotherapy drug called cisplatin that is used for mesothelioma treatment has at its core molecules of platinum, which has proven to damage the DNA in certain types of cancer cells, resulting in their inability to reproduce. This sort of targeted chemotherapy does less damage to surrounding healthy cells than some more general formulations of anti-cancer cell agents.
Another chemotherapy drug approved by the FDA for mesothelioma treatment is pemetrexed, a medication that targets enzymes vital to certain types of cancer cells. This is another successful approach to narrowing the focus of chemotherapy and limiting collateral damage; however some mesothelioma cancer cells have shown resistance to pemetrexed.
For that reason, mesothelioma clinical trials have recently been completed that utilize cisplatin and pemetrexed in combination. The result was a significant extension of survival time for many of the participants. Unfortunately, the extension was a period of months rather than years.
Early Diagnosis: the Key to Mesothelioma Survival
Practitioners working on mesothelioma cancer are faced with the difficult combination of a disease that is usually fully developed when diagnosed and that is a diffuse spread of cancer cells that are not gathered in the form of a tumor, often creating a situation where surgery isn’t a viable option. In addition, its initial symptoms are often readily assumed to be the result of some more common problem such as a pulmonary illness or heart problems.
In order to achieve some pattern of early diagnosis, people who know they have been exposed to asbestos must consult with their doctors and seek some preliminary tests to ensure that there are no signs of the disease. CT and MRI scans can today detect thickening of the mesothelium membrane in some cases. If diagnosis can be made before the physical symptoms appear, the doctor may have some chance of bringing growth of the cell mass to a halt before it is too late.
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